26 The Times Magazine
reputation we have,’ ” he says, looking at me
with cold eyes before breaking into a chuckle.
“So you see. That’s who I am.”
A few years later, Purja would approach
the selection process for the elite Special Boat
Service with the same focus that had seen
him into the Gurkhas. While Gurkhas had
attempted to join the SBS in the past, none
had made it. Purja’s mission was to become
the first. He knew that the challenge would be
demonstrating that he could fit in. “The biggest
thing in special forces selection is that you
want to be a ‘grey man’. Somebody who isn’t
noticed or picked up by the selectors. But
being brown, you’re going to get picked up
from miles away,” he says, gesturing to his
face. “So you have to work twice as hard.”
To help, he memorised bawdy jokes he
thought might go down well and help him fit
in (“Why did the blonde stare at the orange
juice bottle? Because the label read, ‘Juice:
concentrate’ ”), and in 2009 succeeded in
becoming the first Gurkha to join the unit.
During one mission – “Which I can’t really
talk about” – he was shot, an enemy sniper’s
bullet slicing through his lip and across his
jawline. “I got pinged,” he says brightly. “It
was a very narrow escape. But I was able to
keep fighting for another 24 hours.”
Through his time in the SBS, Purja found
himself the target of another kind of sniping.
He would be ribbed about the fact that,
despite being Nepalese, he had never climbed
any seriously big mountains. After years of
this chatter, he snapped – you wonder if the
insinuation of fear, yet again, got to him – and
during a trip home, trained under the guidance
of an experienced Sherpa. Once he had worked
out what he was doing with the crampons
and ice axes and other kit, it did not take
long for Purja to realise that, psychologically
and physiologically, he was almost uncannily
suited to endless uphill slogs. “Wow,” he
thought, after finding he had unwittingly
steamed far ahead of the rest of his party on
one of his early expeditions. “This is my shit.”
An obsession was born. In 2014, he
climbed his first 8,000m peak, conquering
Dhaulagiri with remarkable speed for a
relative novice. Two years later, he decided to
forego a beach holiday he had promised Suchi
and use a rare four-week leave from the SBS
to have a crack at Everest. It would involve
taking out a £15,000 loan as well as burning
through the bulk of his savings. How, I ask,
did the conversation with his wife go when he
floated this? “The way I convinced her was by
saying that when am I going to get this much
leave at exactly the right time in the season
to climb Everest? And honestly, if I go on a
beach holiday, within a few hours I’m bored.
My mind is going at a million miles an hour.
So rather than just chilling out and achieving
nothing, I could be achieving something.”
I feel a bit sorry for Suchi, I say. Purja
smiles and thinks for a moment. “You know,
Suchi and I got married when we were very
young. We kind of grew up together,” he says,
pointing out that they were married before
he entered selection for the SBS and that they
were able to make their relationship work
throughout all the danger and uncertainty
of his time in the special forces. “The brutal
reality is that, if I cannot do what I want to
do, then I am a grumpy man. And nobody
wants that in a relationship. If you are really
good at something, then I think you have
to find a partner who supports what you’re
doing. And if that doesn’t work out, then
I think you have to go your separate ways.
But she knows what kind of person I am.”
Anyway, in 2016 he conquered Everest,
rescuing a female climber on his descent, then
returned the following year to help lead a
team of Gurkhas to the summit as part of the
celebrations to commemorate 200 years of
Gurkha service in the British Army. Whilehis comrades descended and then recovered
in Kathmandu – and making a full physical
recovery from such a climb can take months- he had already decided immediately to set off
to attempt the nearby 8,516m peak of Lhotse.
The record for climbing both Everest and
Lhotse in succession had been 20 hours. Purja
managed to do them both in 10 hours and 15
minutes. He then set another record by adding
Makalu (8,485m). Nobody had managed all
three peaks in less than two weeks. Purja fit
them all inside five days, even finding time
for some heavy celebratory drinking, which
meant he was “brutally hungover” during the
assault on Makalu. “Without the partying in
between, I could have done it in three days,”
he says. “That’s when I realised, ‘Oh. I have
more to give in the mountaineering world.’ ”
Which is how he ended up setting
himself the mission of climbing the world’s
14 highest peaks in 7 months. He called the
endeavour “Project Possible”, but when the
military provided neither the leave nor the
resources to help him achieve it, he resigned
from the SBS. The SAS tried to poach him, he
says, but his mind was set on making good on
the challenge he had created. He remortgaged
his house to help raise funds and used social
media to try to drum up support and interest.
To begin with, neither of these were in
huge supply. It didn’t help that his record-
breaking achievements in 2017 had not been
made public given that he’d been a serving
member of the special forces at the time. But
it also seemed there was a strange reluctance
to cast Purja in the role of conquering
mountaineer. There is something about the
imperialism of adventure – the way we have
been primed to see brooding Great White
Men take on these challenges – which Purja,
being brown, small and somewhat manic,
cut against. He was aware of this. In fact, this
accounted for a lot of his motivation and his
decision to lead a team made up entirely of
Nepalese. “Everyone knows that the Nepalese
climbing community has been the backbone
of 8,000m peaks for God knows how many
years,” he says. But despite this, the Himalayan
Sherpas and porters have found themselves
consistently overshadowed by their employers.
“And the reason is that when people climb
these mountains, all the media is owned by
westerners or Europeans. One of the reasons
I wanted to do this project was to highlight the
name of the Nepalese mountaineers.”
More than anything, though, he “wanted
to show the world what was possible, whateverthe risk”. He had set himself a challenge and,
just as when he was looking for crabs under
rocks in the river as a kid or training for the
Gurkhas or doing selection for the SBS, he
had to see it through. He’s not stopping either.
He tells me, eagerly, that he’s spent the past
two months in the Alps learning an adventure
sport called “speed flying”, a sort of high-octane
paragliding in which you launch yourself off a
peak and skim just above the mountainside at
up to 90mph. “It’s super-dangerous.”
And this December, Purja exclusively
reveals, he will attempt to climb K2 in winter,
a feat that has never been achieved. “A lot of
nations have been trying to stick their flag in
it,” he says. “So that’s what I’m going to try
to do.” Some people within mountaineering
insist that climbing K2 in winter is impossible.
Which is, of course, precisely why he’s trying.
Before he goes, I tell him that I hope we’re
able to meet up and talk about it afterwards.
The Gurkha motto may be “better to die than
be a coward”, but it’s not as if it has to be one
or the other. He holds out his palms and smiles.
“I may go on a mountain tomorrow and
I may never come back. I may just die. I hope I
don’t,” he adds. “But I might.” After he goes,
I spend a long while reassuring myself that
he’ll succeed. It wouldn’t be the maddest thing
he’s done. And he is, as he says, the sort of
person who makes things happen. nBeyond Possible by Nirmal Purja is published
by Hodder & Stoughton (£20)HE CLIMBED THREE MOUNTAINS IN FIVE DAYS: ‘WITHOUT THE
PARTYING IN BETWEEN, I COULD HAVE DONE IT IN THREE DAYS’